Malaysia invests $27-million in Canada's General Fusion startup who will begin building full scale prototype in 2017

A Malaysian state-owned company invested $27 million in General Fusion.
Malaysia's sovereign wealth fund, the Khazanah Nasional Berhad, made an investment with current investors Growthworks and Jeff Bezos's personal venture capital fund. The funds will go to commercializing the company's key technology—a metal sphere pumped full of molten lead-lithium that spews out quantities of energy. The Burnaby-based company has raised over $100 million to date. General Fusion needs to finish refining some technology for the next two years. General Fusion plans to being building the full scale prototype in 2017. General Fusion would have Canadian and Malaysia government backing for the full scale prototype funding.

General Fusion is nearing significant milestones. General Fusion’s Approach is Magnetized target fusion (MTF). Magnetized target fusion is a hybrid between magnetic fusion and inertial confinement fusion. In MTF, a compact toroid, or donut-shaped magnetized plasma, is compressed mechanically by an imploding conductive shell, heating the plasma to fusion conditions.

General Fusion has a full-scale prototype [of the injectors and other subsystems], twin plasma injectors resembling five-metre-long cones, each attached to opposite ends of a three-metre-diameter sphere, would pulse a few milligrams of hydrogen gas, heat it until it becomes a plasma, and inject it into a vortex of swirling liquid metal. Electricity circulating in the plasma would create magnetic fields that bind the plasma together and confine the heat.

From there, an array of as many as 300 huge pistons attached to the sphere’s shell would act like synchronized jackhammers, ramming it at 200 km/hr. This would send shockwaves into the very centre of the chamber, compressing the hydrogen isotopes to 100 million degrees celsius — hot enough for fusion to occur, and good enough to generate clean electricity from steam turbines.

General Fusion reached its milestones on the piston timing about two years ago. Technicians are now perfecting functionality of the plasma injectors.

The nearly 200 capacitors that send 10-gigawatt bursts into General Fusion’s machine were “recycled” from an old laser fusion experiment in Los Alamos, California.

General Fusion has demonstrated the idea with a small-scale device, using pistons driven by explosives, and has raised about $50 million from venture capitalists and the Canadian government. If the company can win another $25 million or so, Laberge says, it will build a beefier implosion system that can compress the plasma to the levels needed for fusion — perhaps within the next two years.

Not sure if the beefier prototype would be the net gain prototype since previously that was $80-100 million.

General Fusion is developing full scale subsystems to demonstrate that they can meet their performance targets. This includes full scale plasma injectors and acoustic drivers, and liquid metal vortex compression tests. Every step is matched with simulation to guide ongoing development work.